Terminology:
The terminologies described in next few sections reflect the scope and are part of present invention.
The Internal Storage of a System:
The storage media such as hard disk drives, memory sticks, memory etc. is connected to a system directly through bus or a few inches of cable. Therefore, the storage media actually is a component of the system in an enclosure.
The External Storage of a System:
The external storage media is not a component of the system in a same enclosure. Therefore, they have to be connected through a connecting medium (e.g. a cable) such as Ethernet cable for IP based storage, Fiber channel cable for fiber channel storage, or such as wireless medium and etc. The storage media of an external storage could be magnetic hard disk drives, solid state disk, optical storage drives, memory card, etc. and could be in any form such as Raid which usually consists of a group of hard disk drives.
The Storage Partition, its Volumes, and the Corresponding File System:
To effectively use storage system, each storage device usually needs to be partitioned into small volumes. After the partition, each of the volumes can be used to establish a file system on it. To simplify the discussion herein, the term of the storage volume, its corresponding file system, and the term of the partition of the storage device are often used without differentiation.
CCDSVM:
It is an abbreviation for a central controlled distributed scalable virtual machine system. The CCDSVM allows a control management station to control a group of systems and provide distributed services to a client system on the Internet, the Intranet, and an LAN environment.
ISP & ASP:
The ISP refers to Internet service provider and the ASP refers to application service provider.
Unless specified, the programming languages and the protocols used by each software modules of instant application, and the computing systems used in this invention are assumed to be the same as described in the mentioned prior patent applications.
In addition, in the drawing, like elements are designated by like reference numbers. Further, when a list of identical elements is present, only one element will be given the reference number.